Time Gypsy

Ellen Klages

A modern post-doctoral physicist gets the opportunity of a lifetime: to travel backward in time and meet her heroine, Dr. Sara Baxter Clarke. But there is something else that Carol McCullough never could have expected in the shockingly oppressive world of 1956: Love.

Time Gypsy

by Ellen Klages

ISBN: 1892391120

Published: 1998

Available Format(s): Chapbook

A modern post-doctoral physicist gets the opportunity of a lifetime: to travel backward in time and meet her heroine, Dr. Sara Baxter Clarke. But there is something else that Carol McCullough never could have expected in the shockingly oppressive world of 1956: Love. Time Gypsy is a journey into the past where time travel, academic rivalry, queer history, and romance intersect. It’s where the scientists are women and have hearts as well as brains. Funny, sweet, and brave, this is an adventure the reader will never forget.

“I’m a sucker for a good time travel story and ‘Time Gypsy’ is one of the best: smart, well-written, and full of heart. They don’t get much better than this.”
—Charles de Lint, author of Medicine Road and The Very Best of Charles De Lint

“It’s a mystery! It’s a romance! It’s a time-travelling work of science fiction. When your happy ending happened ten years before you were born, you need every trick in the book to find it. You need intricate plotting. You need magical storytelling. You need Ellen Klages.”
—Karen Joy Fowler

“‘Time Gypsy’ is about science, about history, and about falling in love. It’s a hard science ‘chick’ story where the scientist is a woman and has a heart as well as a brain. It’s the kind of story I wanted to read when I was growing up, but it just hadn’t been written yet.”
—Ellen Klages

Ellen Klages is the author of The Green Glass Sea, for which she received the prestigious Scott O’Dell Award, and its sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, for which she won the California Book Award. She has also won a Nebula Award and been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Crawford, and Campbell awards. She is member of the Tiptree Motherboard and emcees a popular auction at Wiscon that raises money for the Tiptree Award.

Praise for White Sands, Red Menace

“Sensitively portrays the early coming-of-age of two likable characters in a unique setting…will leave readers anxious to pick up the preceding work.”
—Kirkus

“Superbly written and rich in detail…this book is every bit as powerful as its predecessor.”
—School Library Journal

“Klages’s The Green Glass Sea (2006) won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and in this gripping sequel, set just after World War II, science, mechanics, and politics continue to play a big role in the teen friendship story. Dewey’s atomic-scientist dad has died in a traffic accident, and she has moved in with her friend Suze’s family near Los Alamos. Suze’s dad is driven by his work in the new frantic race to build a rocket (‘The first man in space mustn’t be a Russian’), and he fights bitterly with his peacenik wife, Terry, about Hiroshima and the radiation nightmare. There is sometimes too much local detail, but the ground-breaking science is part of daily life for the smart techno-teens, and the adult characters are as compelling as the kids. As Klages said in an interview in the November 2007 issue of Book Links magazine, people are excited about future technology, ‘and others are afraid that there won’t be a future.’ Along with these global issues, Klages’s compelling story explores personal relationships and what it means to be a family.”
—Booklist

“…an intense but accessible page-turner, firmly belongs to the girls and their families; history and story are drawn together with confidence.” —Horn Book, starred review

“Many readers will know as little about the true nature of the project as the girls do, so the gradual revelation of facts is especially effective, while those who already know about Los Alamos’s historical significance will experience the story in a different, but equally powerful, way.” —School Library Journal

“The story is [a memoir of the life of the small daughter of an atomic scientist, who recounts the events leading up to and following Trinity] in heartbreaking Klages style:, simple, subtle, emotionally powerful writing that will knock you on your ass again and again as you read it…. If you haven’t read Klages before, you’re in for a treat.” —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

“Ellen Klages is a very careful writer—which is to say that she is full of care for her craft and allows her readers the intelligence to take care of themselves. To take care, for instance, of the differences and resonances and contingencies between reality and fantasy, between real life and fairy tale; and to take care of what one can say to and about the other.” —ED SFProject

“Klages gives us sympathetic characters and slow-building suspense in an absorbing novel with a unique view of wartime.” —Newhouse News Service

“This beautifully told and historically accurate story makes you feel what it would be like to be a kid in this surreal, secretive world of scientists, mathematicians, and their families.” —Not Your Mother’s Book Club